Getting Told and Being Believed, Richard Moran
Moran, R. (2006),Getting Told and Being Believed, in Jennifer Lackey & Ernest Sosa, ed.,’The Epistemology of Testimony’, Oxford University Press, , pp. 272-306.
p. 273 – Wants to analyse what ‘telling’ is.
p. 275 – Projects like Coady’s tell us that generally testimony is good but do not tell us whether believing the person is a legitimate and perhaps basis source of new beliefs.
p. 277 – Two issues: people can intend to defraud and what, exactly, does the intentionality of speech acts have to do with the enhancing of knowledge transfers?
Points out that usually we would take intentionally in physical evidence to be bad (i.e. someone deliberately placed the DNA at the crime scene).
p. 280 – ‘Telling someone something is not simply giving expression to what’s on your mind, but is making a statement with the understanding that here is your word that is to be relied on.’
p. 281 – A statement only provides reason for a belief, ala testimony, if it voluntarily given. As hearer’s we are dependent on the speaker (given the above condition). Testimony, then, differs from evidence because evidence plays it role independent of the person who presents it. Testimony must be presented to play its role.
p. 283 – ‘…the point is that the speaker, in presenting his utterances as an assertion, one with the force of telling the audience something, presents himself as accountable for the truth of what he says, and in doing so he offers a kind of guarantee for this truth.’
p. 291 – ‘The account of the this role suggested by the Assurance view is that the mutual recognition of intention can play the role for the audience of providing him with a reason for belief, because he sees the speaker as presenting himself as accountable for the truth of P, and asking, through the recognition of his intention, that this offer of his assurance be accepted.’
p. 294-5 – One feature not taken into account by the evidential view is that the speaker’s responsibility to the hearer.
p. 298 – Promises analogy critique.
p. 299 – ‘So we might say, in telling his audience that P, the speaker asks that his authority be acknowledged to determine what sort of candidate reason for what belief is up for consideration. This is the spirit in which his statement is made, and it is this that is denied by treating his utterance in a wholly evidential spirit, in which the question of what is being considered a reason for what is anybody’s business, and is not tethered to the speaker’s awareness or intent.’
